#growing

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom upon the bough. It stands among the woodland ride, Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my three-score years and ten, Twenty will not come again..." and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples. ↗

— Garrison Keillor

#childhood #garrison-keillor #growing-up #lake-wobegon-days #beauty

It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#growing-old #death

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me! ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#youthfulness #youth

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer? ↗

— Betty Smith

#dreams #growing-up #hope #imagination #leaving

... I wrote about ... my childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit. ↗

— Sarah Winman

#growing-up #life-lessons #dreams

No Temple made by mortal human hands can ever compare to the Temple made by the gods themselves. That building of wood and stone that houses us and that many believe conceals the great Secret Temple from prying eyes, somewhere in its heart of hearts, is but a decoy for the masses who need this simple concrete limited thing in their lives. The real Temple is the whole world, and there is nothing as divinely blessed as a blooming growing garden. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#bloom #blooming #church #deity #faith

I think that's every unresolved person's dream, to wake up one day and know what they want to do the rest of their life. ↗

— Ashley D. Wallis

#life #dreams

One longs and longs to be grown up, doesn't one?," she said, "I dreamed of being eighteen and having a Season and meeting handsome gentlemen even apart from Dominic and falling in love with them and marrying him and living happily ever after. But life is not nearly as that simple when one finally does grow up. ↗

— Mary Balogh

#growing-up #dreams

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. ↗

— John Irving

#childhood

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths? ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#growing-older #experience